


man out of time

by MathildaHilda



Series: until the end of infinity [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve Rogers Has PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 16:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15755595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: He’s counted the times it feels like time stops.It stops at three.*Steve's running out of time.





	man out of time

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Infinity War, a film that I'll NEVER be over

The first time he fought someone, his nose took a hit hard enough to make his nose bleed for over an hour. Not hard enough to break it, but hard enough to make his mother fuss and curse the existence of boys with flying fists.

She never really tried to stop him from fighting, though. She only begged him to be more careful and to keep his arms up and to never beat someone who was down.

He stopped fighting for a while after she died, but when he did start again he took a hit hard enough to break his nose six ways from Sunday and give Bucky a good laugh for years afterward with the way it healed all wrong.

The serum healed the scars on his knuckles and his porous ribs, but it didn’t heal his nose.

It only made Bucky laugh harder.

 

 

 

The problem with living for as long as he did was that he had a hard time forgetting.

A car backfiring used to be just another sound lost in the chaos that was New York. Now, the sound makes him jump, scan his surroundings and make a grab for his shield before he has time to realize that it’s not a threat.

It’s all muscle memory. He can’t make his body forget the trauma and pain and fear it’d endured for almost two years, the memory of it freezing for some sixty years and then come crashing back down like a tidal wave, forcing him to act in a situation he didn’t understand.

His mind can’t forget the Depression, his mother’s death, the loss of Bucky or any part of the whole goddamn war.

Nick Fury said he’d been asleep.

Steve Rogers tells himself, before every restless night, that it was a hell he couldn’t remember.

 

 

 

He looks young, but he can still feel every one of the years he spent trapped underwater.

His body is made to heal itself. Made to repair any kind of damage, no matter the shape or form. But his body has yet to find a way to repair the stiffness of his joints and the aching of his bones whenever he finds that the pond in the park has frozen over, small cracks splintering it when kids throw rocks on it in the hope that it might break, and he feels almost pathetic over the way his pulse quickens when he watches the first flakes of snow fall from the sky.

It’s not the water or the ice or the snow. It’s not being under for decades and not remembering any of it. Those are not the things that scare him.

His mother had once made a comment about how they were falling through time, no one really chained to a clear path in direction or purpose. Seventy years after the words left him confused, he found some semblance of clarity in the words.

While his mother had said it to satisfy his young and restless need for knowledge about everything related to art or space, the much older him found that the reality of the words made him afraid.

 _We’re all falling_ , he thinks at some point, watching his friends laugh over some embarrassing, no doubt funny, story that Stark cranked out. It forces a smile to his lips and it stays there for the rest of the night until they’re called out on a mission by JARVIS.

 _When do we land?_ he asks no one when he sees Bucky attempting to rip his arm off with a vice.

He suspects he’ll never really know.

 

 

 

He doesn’t age the same, but he feels his age by the way new scars heals over old; scars forgotten by everyone but him.

He doesn’t age the same, but he feels the years go by when he watches the gray creep up by Tony’s temples before he dyes it and in the way Clint’s face contorts in pain for less than a moment. He watches Natasha, the only other person who doesn’t seem to age, and sees lines in the smoothness of her skin. They all have secrets, he just can’t figure hers out.

He speaks to Thor about missing time and at first the god laughs before he sees the emptiness with which he speaks. The god has missed time too, but he’s fifteen times older than Steve and even his mind is too small to remember everything.

Bruce makes it a little easier, though the scientist only knows glimpses of the things the Hulk has done. Steve only knows he’s been asleep.

 

 

 

His hands shake whenever he enters a plane, but they are closed into fists by his side and he prays that no one sees the damage time has done. In battle they are closed and never shakes; yet another weapon against yet another oppressor.

He doesn’t recognize the feeling he feels every time he puts on the suit and fights another robot, another alien, another friend.

It’s not fear or anger anymore. Instead, it all starts to feel like a never-ending nightmare that pumps out monster after monster in an attempt to elicit a new response.

But he’s just so damn tired of fighting.

 

 

 

He’d told Doctor Erskine a lifetime ago how he didn’t want to kill anyone, no matter what they’d done. How the only thing he wanted was to put the world right.

Captain America; national hero, patriotic as all hell and a goddamn miracle in a bottle.

_Killer._

They never put the latter in the comics or the papers. Sometimes he suspects that S.H.I.E.L.D has a file over all the known people he’s killed.

Caring hurts but pretending not to care hurts even more.

 

 

 

Time comes to a bleary and blinking stop when Bucky falls through the air and lands with one limb too little, pain and fear ghosting across his face.

Time stops, even if it keeps going. Fury takes over and time doesn’t matter and there’s a little kid in the back of his mind telling him to stop.

So, he stops and Tony’s eyes are wild and afraid and it hurts.

Captain America dies in the place the Winter Soldier was born and leaves a battered past behind in Siberian snow.

 

 

 

Now they’re just two men out of time, running from everything and everyone until time catches up again and slams a well-aimed fist at their noses.

Bucky goes under and Steve admits he’s never felt as lost as he does then. They used to say that they’d brave the future together and watch flying cars zoom about New York. Instead, they're trapped in memory and ice.

 

 

 

Being Nomad is easier.

He still wears the suit, logos gone and abandoned, stripes repainted to make it easier to blend in. The shield lies in Tony’s workshop, a reminder of a mistake they both made, and he fights with his body as the shield’s replacement.

It earns him scars, but what battle doesn’t?

Captain America had morals, had a straight path from the moment he was born.

Nomad is different. Maybe not by much, but he moves through shadows where the Captain moved through light.

Everyone knows the Captain. Everyone knows Steve.

No one knows Nomad.

 

 

 

He’s counted the times it feels like time stops.

It stops at three.

 

 

 

And it's always Bucky.

 

 

 

_They’re all falling through time._

Bucky falls through time in less than a breath and fills the air with dust.

Somewhere far off the General is calling for her King and Rhodes calls for Sam.

He remains frozen in a moment between grief and fear. The racoon begs and Thor mourns the losses only his eyes can see.

His mind spins in a moment and he stumbles and kneels and his fingers shake.

 

 

There’s a numbness to it that he doesn’t expect.

The first time he lost Bucky time hadn’t stopped completely. Hydra wasn’t too far behind and he had to keep fighting. The pain came after. The screams, the tears and the drinking came after.

He’d felt it. He’d lived it.

Now, he doesn’t feel anything.

 

 

 

Vision lies thrown to the side, his body limp and gray in the bright green of the jungle.

But the green isn’t as bright anymore.

Dust touches everything it can get its thin fingers on, coats the trees and embeds itself into the cracks of new scars.

Time stopped when Bucky fell. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

But Wanda doesn’t warp reality around their eyes anymore. The girl lies among the leaves.

 

 

 

Tony had once asked him how they’d planned on beating the threat from above.

_Together._

They’d done it before, so why couldn’t they do it again?

 

_We’ll lose._

 

 

_Then we’ll do that together, too._

**Author's Note:**

> I only made myself sad with this one, dammit
> 
> I tried to, in some capacity, to show just how much of Steve's PTSD we never got to see, and this is just some of it mixed with the events of every major movie he's in. I also played around with the idea that being away for such a long period of time, and not being completely aware of what was happening must have scared him in some way. Especially when characters like Bucky and Bruce shows up and doesn't 100% knows what they've done, while Steve has only been sleeping for 60+ years. Steve wasn't awake in any way or form, but it should still be scary to wake up and find that YEARS have gone by and you never knew!
> 
> I hope I managed to get it across and not confuse it too much! :)


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